ere is little sign that either
Arthur Hallam or Gladstone had in him the making of the patient and
methodical thinker in the high abstract sphere. They were both of them
cast in another mould. But the efficacy of human relationships springs
from a thousand subtler and more mysterious sources than either patience
or method in our thinking. Such marked efficacy was there in the
friendship of these two, both of them living under pure skies, but one
of the pair endowed besides with 'the thews that throw the world.'

Whether in Gladstone's diary or in his letters, in the midst of
Herodotus and Butler and Aristotle and the rest of the time-worn sages,
we are curiously conscious of the presence of a spirit of action,
affairs, excitement. It is not the born scholar eager in search of
knowledge for its own sake; there is little of Milton's 'quiet air of
delightful studies;' and none of Pascal's 'labouring for truth with
many a heavy sigh.' The end of it all is, as Aristotle said it should
be, not knowing but doing:--honourable desire of success, satisfaction
of the hopes of friends, a general literary appetite, conscious
preparation for private and public duty in the world, a steady
progression out of the shallows into the depths, a gaze beyond garden
and cloister, _in agmen, in pulverem, in clamorem_, to the dust and
burning sun and shouting of the days of conflict.

IV

In September 1829, as we have seen, Huskisson had disappeared. Thomas
Gladstone was in the train drawn by the _Dart_ that ran over the
statesman and killed him.

Poor Huskisson, he writes to William Gladstone, the great promoter
of the railroad, has fallen a victim to its opening!... As soon as
I heard that Huskisson had been run over, I ran and found him on
the ground close to the duke's [Wellington] car, his legs
apparently both broken (though only one was), the ground covered
with blood, his eyes open, but death written in his face. When they
raised him a little he said, 'Leave me, let me die.' 'God forgive
me, I am a dead man.' 'I can never stand this.'... On Tuesday he
made a speech in the Exchange reading room, when he said he hoped
long to represent them. He said, too, that day, that we were sure
of a fine day, for the duke would have his old luck. Talked
jokingly, too, of insuring his life for the ride.

And he notes, as others did, the extraordinary ci